Frustrated with El Capitan? So Are We!

El Capitan was released a couple of months back amidst much fanfare and enthusiasm. It promised some exciting new features along with a lot of stability and performance improvements over its previous iterations. Unfortunately, not only has it failed to live up to our expectations, it has also made people scream with frustration: What the bloody hell Capitan!!Here’s our list of the biggest problems we (and many others) are facing with El Capitan:

I came in like a wrecking ball!!

One of the most dreaded sights for any Mac user is the spinning multicolour wait / loading wheel. This ‘beachball’ (as we like to call it) can be seen way too regularly in El Capitan. It pops up every now and then, even while doing mundane things like launching native apps like Safari and Photos!

The OS on the whole feels slow and sluggish – like it had eaten a really heavy meal and was being forced to work against its wishes. So much for an operating system that is supposed to become faster every year.

What’s the word for killing Spotlight? Indexicide

Using Spotlight used to be like second nature to me. And because old habits die hard, I still find myself constantly pressing command + space to pull up Spotlight search. Only now when I hit those keys, hell freezes over, much like my Mac. Our not-so-favorite beachball appears on the screen and a tedious wait starts for the MacBook to become responsive again.

The problem is that with Spotlight’s added “natural language” ability, it is indexing a lot more content than ever before. And all that indexing is taking a toll on this universal search app, making it very slow and frequently unresponsive. Fix it, Apple. Now!

Safari? More like ‘Suffer’-i

I’ve always been a Google Chrome guy, and I will confess that I’ve always wanted to be a Safari guy. Because in the Apple ecosystem, the amount of functionality that Safari adds is a user’s delight. But over the last couple of iterations, Safari seems to be losing its way.

There have been some wonderful features added to Mac’s native browser, but in terms of overall speed and performance, it just hasn’t been able to match up to Chrome. El Capitan only made the problem worse. The browser has become annoyingly sluggish and using it seems to be more and more of a hassle.

iTunes BluesiTunes is probably the Mac’s most used app after Safari. And just like Safari, the new OS is troubling this app as well. This discussion board on the Apple Support Community is filled with customers facing hardships using iTunes.

The biggest complaint, apart from the speed and the lag, is definitely that the new OS is having major issues with MS Office. Granted, OS X and MS Office have never been the best of pals, but at least they got along well enough.

But now, Office keeps crashing even while doing the simplest of tasks, like inserting media, copy-pasting content, or even saving the document. Microsoft themselves released a patch but that was of no use. Apple’s official 10.11.1 update is also supposed to fix those issues, but our experience so far hasn’t been encouraging.

Home Share Shame

Mac’s Home Sharing is a pretty useful tool. We’ve been using it for sometime in our office. Unfortunately though, after upgrading to El Capitan, this feature has been giving us some trouble. More specifically, when trying to access shared files, it keeps asking for each individual’s apple id and password. Why, Apple, why?

Printing Woes

El Capitan is messing up printing PDF files, especially when you want to print something in the landscape mode. What emerges from the printer can only be described as all kinds of weird!

We are not sure if it is a ‘Preview’ problem or a system problem; however, CultofMac suggests the following remedy.

Open System Preferences > Printers & Scanners

Select the Print tab

Right click or CTRL click the printer

Hit ‘Reset Printing System’

Restart your Mac and printer, before trying again.

But honestly, it is 2015. It’s been half a century since we first put a man on the freaking moon. So why is it still so hard to print a PDF, for crying out loud?

AirDrop and Wifi Issues

I don’t really use AirDrop, but on the couple of occasions I did try to pair my MacBook Pro with an iPhone, it was unable to even connect, much less transfer data. I have also found some issues with wifi connectivity, but fortunately it was easily fixed by deleting the old Airport Preferences from the System Preferences App.

It is really a shame that Apple has overlooked so many of the finer details this time around. Even the first round of patches have not been that effective. We will have to wait for 10.11.2 to arrive and see if it fixes all (or at least some) of these issues. We’re praying pretty hard that it does.